The New Space Opera 2

by Gardner Dozois

  With the mother world destroyed, the simulation of Earth in the dream libraries seemed mere mockeries. Radio broadcasts from Tau Ceti (more than a thousand years old by the time they were overheard) spoke of a Second Earth that the Shakudo Oecumene there had built, a replica meant to serve as a mortuary mask of the great, lost world.

  The Orichalc Oecumene at the yellow star 72 Ophiuchus made a similar announcement. Even the grim and laconic commonwealth at Lalande 21185, called the Hepatizonic or the Black Corinthian Bronze Oecumene, broke radio silence to announce it had also reconstructed, molecule by molecule, an Earth in tribute to the lost Earth, from one ice cap to the other, with each famous mountain and many-mythed rivers in place. The Electrum Oecumene at Delta Pavonis, the Molybdochalkos Oecumene at Mu Arae, and the warlike Prince Rupert’s Metal Oecumene at 61 Cygni all followed suit.

  Even the humble and poverty-stricken Alpha Brass Oecumene at Proxima attempted a re-creation. Their Luna-sized replica held nothing but Fourth Era Australia, surrounded by a little world-ocean slightly bigger than the Antarctic Sea, so that sea-vessels could sail across an Eastern hemisphere uninterrupted from the Brain-Hives at Brisbane to the Great Glass Cube at Perth.

  By the time the Diaspora of the Renunciation had reached Eta Carina, and tens of thousands of years had witnessed the foundation of many more colonies in the near neighborhood of Sol, there were twenty known replicas of Earth, restocked from biotic libraries.

  While the rest of the ships sailed the beam from Canopus to Eta Carina, Penelope’s gossamer ships, leaving the beam-path of the Diaspora, lingered on the far side of the Great Carina Nebula, straining to catch the ever-weaker signals of the interstellar radio chatter. Whole libraries of information were passed to and fro, including the gene patterns for all earthly life still in record, images, sensations, smells, and noumenal memories of Earth, all locked in fractal format. The Earth-makers were comparing notes, confirming and correcting. Penelope, because she tarried and heard, became the custodian of their local version of Earth.

  14. The Soldiery of Paradise

  During this long sojourn away from the Diaspora, Penelope also overheard the clamor of battle in the radio messages from the far stars. From the terrifying Oecumene at Lalande 21185, came the challenge from the military Warmind of the Golden Peers, or, rather, from their deadly once-human servant Atkins, daring the Lords of the Silent Oecumene to face them in battle.

  Atkins! The name still echoed in the legends and histories of the Chrysopoeians. He was their devil, their croquemitaine. During the long period of peace and justice of the Golden Age, he had been the sole warrior kept in readiness against any violence offered by rebellion or social tumult, and equipped with such weapons as to make hostility unthinkable.

  When the hidden acts of war by the Swans finally erupted into the open, all the minds and mental systems gathered into one grand and supernal Transcendence at Sol; and the College of Hortators was replaced by a College of War; and interstellar ships, never before needed or designed, were wrought and armed with terrible weapons and crewed and captained by the single soldier template.

  A thousand, nay, ten thousand versions of Atkins were embodied in every form of military monster, from tanks larger than cities, nanomachines smaller than viruses, and scattered to every theater of combat, both real and virtual.

  Rumor said he fought himself and killed himself in desperate training exercises, that he might learn what could overcome him; myth reported how he drove himself insane, so that variations of his mind might come within psychological congruence with his foes, and military intelligence profiles be erected in the Warmind sophotechs.

  Part of his mind, memes and routines and habits of discipline, were sent into the hands of millions of civilians, so that they might have the spirit and the patriotism needed to support him in his dreadful, irrational, perpetual war.

  It was in rebellion against this necessity, and outrage against the violations of their pristine mental state, that a school called the Renunciation gathered funds and subscriptions to send partial versions or complete copies of themselves and their libraries across the years of time and light-years of space, away from the war and death and deceits of Sol. By design, so that they could not be followed or found, they decided on no destination until after they were under way.

  15. The Stone of the Philosophers

  Ulysses did not share his memories with her. Instead, he put his story into words, images, moving images, and composed a symphony. Let her, if she would, imagine what it was like: he was too fierce and too honorable a man to inflict what he had suffered on her.

  The Renunciants had sailed from Sol to Canopus by launching laser. The laser was cut off when Earth died. Without the laser light to tack against, without external sources of energy, the fleet was forced to burn whole ships into reaction mass, lest they overshoot their destination. The larger and less-human thinking machines coolly volunteered for suicide; martyrs, and there was no storage space to save them.

  From Earth, there was no last emergency narrowcast of noumenal information, no warning cry. An examination of the embedded messages sent in the final seconds of the laser stream revealed only routine comments. Then—silence.

  At Canopus, less than a light-century from Earth, the Diaspora paused for many centuries, sophoforming certain planets found there, and cannibalizing their immense vessels to shipwright many smaller ones. This was the birth of Ulysses, who was dispatched toward Eta Carina.

  Off into the long darkness he went. Mostly, he dreamed: even computers must run routines in their subsystems to do error-checking and-correcting, or exercise their minds to keep themselves sane. Understanding the mechanics behind thought had not alleviated man from the limitations of thought.

  And his dreams were all of war: he saw the Earth on fire, smelled burned flesh, heard the screams of orphans, and the thinner wails of babies clenched in a dead mother’s arms, seeking to suckle and finding no milk at the lifeless breast. In those dreams he saw the Swans: figures in faceless silver faceplates, under elfin coronets of nodding spindles and plumes, robed in peacock-hued fabrics, wearing gauntlets crusted and begemmed with sophotechnic circuitry and thought-ports.

  Once he woke. He was passing near one of those sunless bodies, something larger than Uranus, a globe of silicarbons paved in dark methane ice, which were surprisingly common in interstellar space. It had its own panoply of rings and little moons. The lifeless world dwindled beyond instrument range, and was gone. As the discoverer, he had the privilege of naming it: he called the rogue world Elpenor.

  That was all. There was nothing else to look at. Again he hibernated.

  When he reached the Eta Carina system, he cannibalized his empty engines and ceased to be a ship. He ate the nearby planetoids and put on weight and became a world with a wide orbit.

  He was a watery world, covered with oceans from pole to pole. Storing water above his decks solved certain radiation problems, and allowed him to retire an expensive artificial Van Allen belt. More for decoration than anything else, he used his oceans as aquariums, bringing forth dolphins and whales and other extinct species out of his digital genetic archives. Cetaceans played and sported under skies of fire, for even at one thousand AU’s, distant Eta Carina A and B were monsters, variable stars with strangely pulsating cores.

  Sending out remotes, he gathered the rich material from the nebulae, microengineered and dumped it (in the form of a billion tons of hungry nanomachine assemblers) on some unsuspecting ice giant of a world, and from its hulk constructed a broadcast antenna. Oh, how he wished for telepathy or tachyons or some way to outwit the limits of the spacetime: but the universe had only provided itself with exactly one electromagnetic spectrum, and more exotic ways of transmitting information did not operate at macroscopic scales. Ulysses could build nothing fundamentally different, merely larger, than what Marconi had built, back in the days of the Second Mental Structure. He built an antenna and radioed his findings to Canopus, over seven thou
sand light-years away.

  His report said, in brief, that no one in his right mind would want to live anywhere near Eta Carina.

  The sun was wavering near that tipping point where outward nuclear pressure from fusion could no longer equal the inward pressure of gravity. It was a powder-keg of a system, a Vesuvius waiting to blow. The size and instability of the main star, and its iron core of stellar ash staggering ever nearer to critical mass, suggested that when it collapsed and exploded, it would not be a nova, but a hypernova, such as have been seen in distant galaxies, the origin of exceptionally bright gamma-ray bursts.

  The Diaspora at Canopus debated the options. Xi Puppis, Miaplacidus, the cluster at M93, were closer and more stable. The star HD70642 was known to have a Neptune-size world inhabitable to the Neptune-adapted Eremites organizing the expedition. The star HD 69830 was observed to have an asteroid belt rich in rare minerals, the preferred habitat of the microgravity-adapted Invariants. NGC 2423–3 b, also called Mayor’s Star, in the open cluster NGC 2423, boasted a super-jovian world ten times the size of Jupiter, with the type of collapsed-matter diamond core that made sophogenesis of a megascale logic diamond so practicable. All these stars were closer than Eta Carina not by tens or hundreds, but by thousands of light-years. All were in the Orion Arm.

  Eta Carina was the worst choice. And so, by the backward logic of the Warlocks, it was the last place anyone would look for them.

  A megascale structure surrounded Canopus, magnetically squeezing the star like an orange. The fields released a vent of energy, which a series of transformation rings gathered, lased, focused, and aimed. No one can see a laser in a vacuum, unless he steps in the path. If any eyes were watching Canopus, they saw the output dim, and knew the Diaspora was setting sail, but there was no way to detect toward which point of the compass that vast wash of energy was directed.

  (A mystery surrounds the decision. An examination of the thought-patterns kept in record, or reconstructed by paleopsychoarcheologists, reveals an anomaly. When the same debate is run with the same minds with the exact same thoughts in modern simulation, the simulations reach a different result. This implies that a virus-thought altered the outcome. Who now knows what actually influenced them?)

  Meanwhile, for ten millennia, Ulysses lived alone with his fish, and a taciturn chess partner dubbed Other-Ulysses.

  Ulysses had, as part of his operational psychology, a memory casket containing a personality (based on Cold Duke psychological templates) capable of never being lonely, capable of facing unflinchingly the fact that he would never see another human being or human machine again.

  All he had to do was open it, and his capacity for love, his desire for it, would be burned away forever. The new him would never go back to human psychology because it would never be able to imagine any reason to do so.

  Ulysses was actually toying with the locks on that casket when messages came from the orbital telescopes his remotes had sent out, that the star Canopus was blazing like the eye of a Cyclopes, burning like the Bethlehem Star.

  In a delirium of happy disbelief, he began to make ready the radiation-poisoned wilderness of Eta Carina for human habitation.

  By the time the fleet from Canopus arrived, the system was filled with dolphins.

  16. The Eighth Mental Structure

  It was not that Ulysses was prying. He had sent certain partial-selves and thought-chains into her sophosphere for perfectly legitimate reasons. It was just that Cerebellines are less strict about the boundaries of personality and persona. They let the thoughts of their pets commingle with them, and fluctuate in and out of various states of mental organization, so that for something with a base-neuroform psychology, it is hard to tell where the legal boundaries, or the limits of courtesy, arise.

  Let us pretend that Ulysses walked into Penelope’s bedchamber, to which he had perfect right and permission to go, and found a diary lying open.

  A more perfect gentleman might not have read it, but he was old-fashioned and had quaint notions that man and wife could be a legal unity, even without forming a two-member composition. He did not think that she should keep secrets from him.

  By the nature of the problem of transition into the Eighth Mental Structure, the boundary conditions could not be known. The Eighth Mental Structure, when it came to pass (if it had not already) would involve singularity metrics applied to thought: it would be an application of the noetic immortality technology of the Golden Oecumene of Earth to the black-hole engineering technology of the Silent Oecumene of Cygnus X-1.

  Because it is the nature of a singularity that an event horizon parts the outer from the inner frame of reference, any neuron (biological or mechanical) used as part of a brain structure could theoretically have any number of additional amounts of thought-information within it, no matter what the position in the thought-pattern of the neuron might be. A simple one in a string of ones and zeroes could, using the quantum fractals of Silent Oecumene math-sorcery, contain any number of imaginary numbers within it, in the same way a pinpoint black hole could contain a world.

  There was no way, even theoretically, to tell from the outside of a closed frame of reference, what was inside—and this applied both in physics and, apparently, in neural semantics.

  It meant, perhaps, that all thoughts were false, and the real personality, persona, and thought-matrix of any particular person was hidden behind the mathematical equivalent of an event horizon.

  In her diary, Ulysses found the musings of Penelope slowly turning into obsessions, manic self-examination. With her strange and decentralized form of self-awareness, she often caught herself doing and thinking things for which she had no clear motive, where later examination of her thought-logs showed strange ellipsis.

  Penelope feared that she was inhabited, possessed, infected. She no longer trusted herself. The one thought that kept tormenting her: she had been outside the obscuring cloud of the Great Carina Nebula long after the main Diaspora had departed, straining to overhear any radio traffic concerning the death of Earth. There had been no one around to see. Perhaps a radio beam of the Silent Oecumene, carrying a thought-virus, had been swept into her systems, or a ship had approached, fought, defeated, and compromised her, and erased all evidence of the battle.

  Imagine that he was poring over these strange speculations when she walked in on him. He straightened up, trying to control his expression; but she sees and knows what he has done, and the lavender eyes of the olive-skinned beauty do not flash with anger but with a cold disdain that cuts him worse than anger.

  It was not literally like this. She could have deduced from the change in his information flows between the various levels of his thought hierarchy that he was trying to keep something from her—the easiest way was never to download into his man-body any memory he did not want her planet-wide biomass to guess. But her thought-logs would show when and where he had come near the diary material. Her reaction was to continue to carry out her legal duties toward his biosphere, but to erect barriers and firewalls between thought-information they previously had shared.

  The millions of lines of communication, the arguments, the pleadings, the reconciliation, the songs of thought and symphonies of dream, all boil down to one thing. He said, “Are we not man and wife?”

  She said, “So one might hope, however small that hope is.”

  “What are you hiding from me? Why?”

  She did not answer, but over the next few years, the black non-earthly life forms grew over more mountain peaks, and dark spores rode the winds, and a river of oily iodine-hued living material for the first time trickled through forests (as denuded and unsightly as a balding widow’s hair) into the sea.

  It was one of his remotes, a partial-mind copy of himself occupying a body no larger than a battle cruiser, who answered him. “She fears you mean to murder her.”

  Ulysses rejected that idea as madness; and yet, the fear and sickness covering the forests and oceans of the earth were clear to see: trees w
ere dying, rivers becoming yellow and clogged with silt, reindeer failing to mate, leopards failing to hunt.

  He sent her a message: “You fear you have a deeper self, sleeping inside your consciousness, ready to awake and brush you aside? Even were you a Lord of the Silent Oecumene, I could not attack—I am vowed to peace, as are all Renunciants.”

  She replied, “Not I. You.”

  Penelope’s thoughts on the matter were plain. Ulysses did not know himself, but, like the Hawking radiation that seeps from physical singularities, information singularities were imperfect.

  “Some traces of your true personality escape,” she said. “There were clues. Why are your remotes so well-armed? Why do you reward them with medals and honor their valor? Your inability to piece the clues together, even with a brain the size of a large moon, indicates a redaction system is keeping the self-awareness from you.”

  At this point, we can imagine Ulysses, in the cool depth of his logic diamond brain, activates that simulation complex which precisely impersonates the human sensations of fear. He has no parasympathetic nervous system, but the flow of information-quanta in his noumenal subroutines can be affected in the same way a biochemical brain is influenced by midbrain-hindbrain reactions. People who, for good reasons or foolish ones, edit out the parasympathetic fear-cycle in their thought systems no longer think like base neuroform human beings.

  And so Ulysses is afraid.

  “We selected this place for our colony,” Penelope was saying, “because the surrounding nebula would tend to absorb or splash any radio lasers passing through it, and smother certain bands of energy signal. Anything not lost in the glare of the near-nova sun would be smogged out by the nebular dust. We placed ourselves allegedly far from the theater of war. And yet, not by chance, we sit atop a power supply even the Silent Oecumene might envy: a hyper-supernova. All that would be required would be an agreement among the sophotechs dwelling below the solar corona. Corrupted sophotechs, those found working for the enemy, could be destroyed without any explanation, considering how dangerous the work is.”